I started programming with Pascal in 8th grade. Pascal was a very good starting point back then. I quickly learned the basics of programming and created my first game. It was a snake game running in console like we had in Nokia phones. Unfortunately I could not find the source code or any screenshot of my game 🙁

Internet access was very limited in Turkey and it was almost impossible to find Turkish resources about programming. That’s why I wanted to share my little knowledge about Perl with my Turkish fellows. But there was a problem. I didn’t have a credit card to buy a domain name or pay for the hosting. I found a free hosting service that gave a small disk space and created my first website (erdemkose.azit.com) titled “CGI with Perl” in 1999. It is still online thanks to Internet Archive. I would like to thank to them for providing this excellent service.

My first website

I remember checking my visitor counter at the bottom of the page every day. That was the only free way to measure visitor engagement. It was 6 years before Google launched Analytics.

Do you remember the times that Cloudflare was just an easy to set-up CDN? With the launch of Cloudflare Registrar, only missing feature in Cloudflare is hosting.

With the new service, you can register the domain name you already added to Cloudflare. Cloudflare promises that they will only charge for the registry cost, nothing else. This means a domain name could cost only a couple of dollars.

You need to login to your Cloudflare account and add as many domains as you can. After that, you must claim your place in line.

Nginx is getting more and more market share every day. However, nginx is more than just a web server. Here you can find how to use it as an image server.

How often do you need to generate different sizes of images on your site or application? I need it almost every time. Unfortunately image processing in PHP is a time and memory consuming operation. So what are our options?

Configure nginx as an image server

Nginx has the ability to manipulate images with the ngx_http_image_filter_module. If you do not have this module enabled on your host, you should build from the source with the --with-http_image_filter_module configuration parameter.

Caching generated images

If you use the above configuration, your images will be cached on the client side but the requested image will be regenerated for every request. This is not something you would want to use your precious CPU time. To avoid regeneration, you can make your server to cache the results.

Sequence Diagram of Nginx as an image server (with cache)

Nginx has built-in caching mechanism but to use this cache, we need to seperate web and image server. Web server redirects the request to local image processing server and caches the result.

Example configuration for web and image server (with cache)

In this scenario, you must create two server instances. First instance will serve the usual web content.

I’m moving to Berlin this month and I see this as a good opportunity to make new career choices. Berlin is a great city for a software developer. There are many international companies and lots of start-ups. If you need to find a job in Berlin, LinkedIn and Indeed are great sites to look for job listings. Also you can use Glassdoor to learn more about the companies and salaries.